Tango—The Original "Dirty Dancing"

When, in 1866, a couple danced the first tango, it was a shocker. So much so that the other dancers cleared the floor and stood back gaping. These dancers were not the middle class elite. They were workers at a produce market, farmers, carters, casual laborers, and women who were there to sell the only thing they had to sell. As a class they were not overly fixated on propriety or morality. 

Until that day, dancing with a partner had been chaste—involving no physical contact beyond touching hands. But here in a rancho—a large thatch-roof stall, cleared on a Sunday evening for the weekly dance that had become an attraction at this recently established market, with a conjunto of two or three musicians playing a habanera, a man grabbed a woman and danced around the floor with her pressed tightly to his body. Given the provocative appeal of this new approach to dance, the onlookers quickly mastered their surprise and joined in. Two weeks later they celebrated the first dance ever publicly advertised as a tango. 

Why tango? The word itself came to the Río de la Plata with the slaves who were brought there from West Africa during the colonial era. For the Africans a tangó (accent on the last syllable), was a raucous celebration with dancing to the rhythm of many drums. It was from those tangós that candombe emerged with the colorful comparsas that still parade through the streets of Montevideo, Uruguay.

But in the 19^th Century, before the advent of electricity and automobiles and the rest, city dwellers along the Río de la Plata were accustomed to silence at night, with nothing more than an occasional dog barking or the sound of horses’ hooves or the wheels of an ox cart. And so at various times the municipalities adopted ordinances banning tangós as a public disturbance or nuisance. As a result, tangó had taken on the connotation of something naughty, transgressive, illegal.

And so, anticipating a hue and cry from the constituted authorities both religious and temporal, the dancers of 1866 defiantly called their new dance tango—the accent eventually shifting in conformity to the norms of Spanish pronunciation. For the most part, the dance known as tango was not banned—not entirely—though some years later, in Buenos Aires, for a time it was officially illegal to dance cortes and quebradas. Corte was a term used for any halt in the caminata­—the circular movement of the dancers around the floor—for  the purpose of making figures called quebradas—breaks in the tango posture involving the full body press seen occasionally today in tango shows. (The corte and the quebrada, incidentally, are believed to have come from candombe and therefore bore connotations of wild abandon, or if you will, “dirty dancing.” 

A posed quebrada

For most of its first half century tango was shunned by polite society along the Río de la Plata. It was the dance of the lower classes, danced in the streets of the arrabals—the poor barrios that ringed the cities—or in venues such as waterfront bars and brothels. Publicly shunned, that is. For well-heeled young men were frequent visitors to such establishments, where the ladies in residence were happy to teach them the tango. It was in one such establishment, incidentally, that Ernesto Ponzio, a 13-year-old Buenos Aires musician, in 1898 composed “Don Juan,” one of the most famous and enduring pieces of tango music (and in 1911 the first to be recorded). At the time he was playing his violin in a brothel called “Lo de Mamita” (Little Mama’s Place). But where else for dirty dancing to get its start? 

           

*For a more detailed account of tango's early history see  "Tango--A Rustic Beginning"